Advertisement

Advertisement

Third World fends off controls on forests

Efforts by Western governments and environmentalists to persuade tropical
countries to accept international supervision of their rainforests ended
in failure.

A series of all-night sittings by negotiators and private arm-twisting
by Klaus Topfer and Michael Howard, the German and British environment ministers,
failed to sway developing countries, particularly India, China and Malaysia.
They resisted all suggestions that their natural resources should be ‘internationalised’.

For two years, members of the G7 group of industrialised countries have
worked to create a legally binding forest convention. After talks on a convention
broke down late last year, they settled on signing a declaration of forest
principles that would include a commitment to a future convention. But during
10 days of negotiation in Rio, the rival G77 group of developing countries
resolutely ensured that all references to a future convention were expunged
along with all but the vaguest references to an international reporting
procedure on the state of forests.

All that has survived is a general statement about balancing forest
exploitation with conservation and a commitment to keep the principles ‘under
assessment of their adequacy with regard to further international cooperation’.

Advertisement

A triumphant Indian environment minister, Kamal Nath, told journalists:
‘We understand the global importance of forests.’ But he insisted that they
must remain national resources. ‘We do not talk about the globalisation
of oil. Yet oil has a greater impact than forests on the global environment,’
he said.

On the eve of the summit, George Bush had announced in Washington plans
to spend $150 million on forest aid projects, a first instalment in a planned
doubling of forest aid. He and his delegation leader in Rio, William Reilly,
hinted at more announcements to come.

But there were no new commitments in Bush’s speech to the summit last
Friday. After Bush had spoken, Senator Tim Wirth, an experienced environmental
campaigner who is close to the US delegation, said there had been ‘a lot
of skirmishing at the White House’ over whether to make a new announcement
on forests. ‘It disappeared last night,’ he said.

A few minutes later, another green Senator, Al Gore, told a meeting
that the failure of the forest negotiations ‘was an inevitable result of
the North’s failure to agree limits on carbon dioxide emissions’, in the
Climate Convention negotiations.

Third World governments had also been angered by statements by Bush
that stressed the role of forests as a sink for carbon dioxide. ‘The message
seemed to be that it was far wiser to invest in forests than to cut emissions
of carbon dioxide,’ said Bill Mankin of the American conservation group,
the Sierra Club.